So, what do you do?" Whenever people asked him, Eric Cash used to have a dozen answers. Artist, actor, screenwriter . . . But now he's thirty-five years old and he's still living on the Lower East Side, still in the restaurant business, still serving the people he wanted to be. What does Eric do? He manages. Not like Ike Marcus. Ike was young, good-looking, people liked him. Ask him what he did, he wouldn't say tending bar. He was going places--until two street kids stepped up to him and Eric one night and pulled a gun. At least, that's Eric's version.

In Lush Life, Richard Price tears the shiny veneer off the "new" New York to show us the hidden cracks, the underground networks of control and violence beneath the glamour. Lush Life is an Xray of the street in the age of no broken windows and "quality of life" squads, from a writer whose "tough, gritty brand of social realism . . . reads like a movie in prose" (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times).

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:

Amazon Significant Seven, March 2008: No one has a better ear and eye for the American city than Richard Price, and in Lush Life, his first novel in five years, he leaves the fictional environs of Dempsy, New Jersey, where Clockers, Freedomland, and Samaritan were set, for a few crowded blocks of Manhattan's Lower East Side. There's a crime at the heart of the story, but you don't read Price for plot. Instead, you listen as he peels apart layers of class and history through the way his characters talk to each other: hipster bartenders who tell people they're really writers, homeboys from housing projects named after the Jewish immigrants who have long left the neighborhood, and cops, cops, cops, circling the streets looking for a collar, disappearing into their cases as their own lives go to ruin. --Tom Nissley

About the Author:

Richard Price is the author of seven novels, including Clockers, Freedomland, and Samaritan. He won a 2007 Edgar Award for his writing on the HBO series The Wire.

Book Description Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. Book Condition: New. Brand New, Unread Copy in Perfect Condition. A+ Customer Service! Summary: "With LUSH LIFE Richard Price has become our post-modern American Balzac. Except that he's a whole lot funnier than Balzac and writes the language we hear and speak better than any novelist around, living or dead, American or French. He's a writer I hope my great-grandchildren will read, so they'll know what it was like to be truly alive in the early 21st century." Russell Banks "This is it, folks. The novel about gentrified New York, circa right now, that we've been waiting for. Richard Price understands what's happened to our beloved city, he writes dialogue like a genius, and he absolutely, genuinely cares. Unforgettable." Gary Shteyngart "Richard Price is the greatest writer of dialogue, living or dead, this country has ever produced. Wry, profane, hilarious, and tragic, sometimes in a single line, Lush Life is his masterwork. I doubt anyone will write a novel this good for a long, long time." Dennis Lehane "Price writes with the slightly manic desperation of someone determined to tell the absolute truth . . . This heightened, anxious awareness of moral and psychological complexity . . . is one of the accomplishments of first-rate writing." Francine Prose, The New York Times Book Review , on Freedomland. Bookseller Inventory # ABE_book_new_0374299250

Book Description Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2008. Cloth, d.j. Book Condition: New. 0374299250 455 pages. SIGNED by Author. A new unread copy. U.S. orders are shipped from our Lewiston, New York location. Bookseller Inventory # 034737

Book Description Farrar Straus Giroux, 2008. Hardcover. Book Condition: New. Dust Jacket Condition: New. 1st Edition... New York: FSG [2008]. First edition. First printing. Hardbound. SIGNED BY AUTHOR on title page. New in dust jacket. A tight unread copy. Purchased new and never opened except for author to sign. PEN/Faulkner Award finalist, 2009. You cannot find a better copy. Signed by Author(s). Bookseller Inventory # mfm0308-11